Abbott's budget reply delivers a perfect political score

Not freaky. Not forgettable. Tony Abbott's budget reply established the extent to which the opposition leader is not messing around. He's as supple as a Romanian gymnast, writes Annabel Crabb.

Budget reply speeches tend on the whole to range from freaky to forgettable.

In past years they have been either empty rants (Abbott 2011) or ephemeral brain-howls (Brendan Nelson's 2008 hommage to Ute Man, with its swiftly-forgotten 5c cut to petrol excise, or Malcolm Turnbull's 2009 promise to hike cigarette taxes by an eighth).

But this budget reply speech, tonight, was genuinely interesting.

Hell, it was always going to be interesting.

Given that Mr Abbott loomed so palpably in the strategy behind that actual budget ("Hello, Mr Probably-About-To-Be-Prime-Minister. We've borrowed your credit card and spent $100 billion buying puppies for the world's poor. But you go on and return them if you like"), his response could never have been entirely tedious.

What was surprising was the clarity with which Mr Abbott's speech confirmed the topsy-turvy nature of politics today.

A Labor government is going to an election with a budget full of austerity measures.

And a Coalition opposition is determined to maintain $4 billion in payments to low-income Australians, while blithely eliminating their source of funding.

The budget reply speech tonight establishes, in case there was any doubt, the extent to which Tony Abbott is not messing around.

The popular expectation that the Opposition Leader, widely accused of being a dangerous ideologue, would self-immolate in a pile of Ian Plimer pamphlets or otherwise pull a tactical hammy has proven seriously unfounded.

The Government likes to portray Mr Abbott as an extremist hardliner, but the truth is the Liberal leader is as supple as a Romanian gymnast, with an unnervingly similar taste in Lycra.

Consider the difficulties he confronted this evening.

First: How to unpick the carbon tax and institute his own horribly-complicated replacement without needlessly antagonising everyone who's already taken delivery of the compensatory payments?

Solution: Keep the compensation where it is, eliminating one considerable element of the administrative tangle to come, and pitch the payments as a cost-of-living, 'Tony gets it' gesture.

(In case you missed this, Tony pointed out early on in his speech that he gets it, cost-of-living wise. His wife Margie, a childcare centre director, also gets it.)

Second: What to do about Labor's dastardly plan to lock the opposition into its own spending priorities, DisabilityCare and the Gonski education reforms, and the cuts it proposes in order to pay for them?

Solution: Mr Abbott has reserved the right to gobble up all of Labor's austerity measures. He has reserved the right to vote for them. He has reserved the right to attribute them to Labor's shameful budgetary mismanagement. He has reserved the right to introduce them himself if Labor forgets to.

Are you getting the picture?

This includes cutting the Baby Bonus, the chubby progeny of Mr Abbott's ideological parent figure, John Howard.

If the Treasurer was gambling that Mr Abbott would baulk at the slightly fratricidal feel of killing it off, he lost tonight.

The Opposition Leader will cheerfully kill it off, and more besides.

Mr Abbott reserves the right to do all the nasty things Labor promised to do on Tuesday night. Not because he wants to, he explained this evening. But because the Government has been so very dreadful, he argues, it leaves him no choice.

It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission, a less vigilant Mr Abbott once said.

But it is better still to reassign the culpability for one's offence, and that is exactly what the Opposition Leader has managed to do tonight.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.